EA have a vested interest in seeing the NBA Live franchise land at the top of the basketball simulation sub-genre. While this year's iteration doesn’t quite get there, they’ve made a big enough leap for people to take notice, especially given the much lower price point than NBA 2K18.

While the hand-to-hand battle mechanics are a bit spongy - the targeting system especially so - the gun fights are a joy to control.

A solid sequel with minor improvements to a successful formula.

The problem is, once you've worked out how each mini-game works, you realise there's little to no skill involved. In fact, some of them are completely random.

Unbalanced characters and a very steep difficulty curve can cause an unnecessary amount of frustration. The Story Mode (playable from either the DC or MK point of view) was interesting to progress though and had some well thought-out storylines. But eventually you’ll come up against a near unbeatable foe like Scorpion who will put a dampener on your enjoyment levels.

The Club wears its heart proudly on its sleeve and makes no apologies for what it is: beautiful, finely crafted gameplay that grabs one by the throat and demands they play some more.

It feels a lot like a 99c iPhone game from a year ago (you'd expect more variety from a 99c iPhone game today), making it disappointingly low value at PSN prices. It does what it does well enough, but it's super niche and probably of interest to relatively few.

The end result is that car enthusiasts will enjoy the customisation options and traditional driving methods but other fans of the series will be frustrated at the missing action from previous games.

For those who persevere and manage to find themselves one with the controls – those that embody the life of a snake – you’ll likely look back on this as a hidden gem that was glossed over by far too many. Personally it’s a game that I enjoy; one that I want to finish but never will. The pain of dropping to my death and losing minutes of progress for the eighth time, because my fingers just couldn’t keep up, outweighs the immense joy I got from succeeding on the ninth attempt.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is a good first person parkour game, provided you keep your momentum going. Chaining move after move while running across rooftops feels very satisfying, but putting the brakes on to fight or pick up collectibles grinds the fun to a halt. An okay storyline keeps you running, but ultimately, graphics that are above-average at best, and an open world that is essentially corridors stitched together means Mirror’s Edge Catalyst falls short of what we really want out of this franchise.

Skylanders: Imaginators is doing nothing the series wasn’t already doing, it’s just doing it in a more overt way. It’s bored with hiding its monetisation behind things like fun and subtlety. Instead of a focus on story and mechanics, Imaginators simply wants you to build a custom creation. When you’re done with that, they want you to make another.

An inscrutable black box, covered in punk-rock graffiti and splattered in blood.

State of Decay has everything you could ever imagine in a zombie game, and than some. But, it still plays and feels like an Xbox Live Arcade game. Thankfully, at around $30, it’s priced like one too.

So, WWE 2K16, at least in Career Mode, is horribly frustrating. Everywhere else, it’s just mildly frustrating. You can play single matches, tag team matches, fatal 4-ways, and triple threat matches online, but just remember all fights are extended QTEs, so if you experience any lag, you’re in big trouble.

Rain is a moving yet quiescent exploration of a very real emotion. It manages an unsettling but tranquil tale that wants you to confront your own fears of being alone. It does so with story and gameplay in unison, though it could have told us a lot more by saying a little less.

It will take casual players around seven hours to complete, but there is little reason to come back to the game after the climactic finish, which makes this title difficult to recommend to everyone.

Xenoverse 2 is best for those who missed the first game, as they are far, far, far too similar. Many of the maps are recycled, and really so is the combat. But your abstinence as a Dragon Ball fan (and aren’t we all) will be dearly compensated with an expanded version. Neither its story nor treadmill-fighting are likely to get you zealing for a year’s training at 500-times Earth’s gravity, but you’ll be up to your Dragon Balls in creative things to do, with an excitable use of the lore. The Xenoverse series may only exist to piggyback the monetary success of western game design, though whether sincere or not, that’s actually the best part of this translation. Like all of these games with steep stories, the depth of your enjoyment will likely depend on the depth of your fandom.

There are a bunch of features I have not mentioned; teleports, a well thought out maps, network play, and a storyline that has a fair amount of depth - to name just a few - however there are some aspects you just need to play and experience to understand why I have rated this game reasonably highly. Yes, I liked it, and I was a fool to dismiss it so easily. The game is available now on Steam, and at a very reasonable price given its quality. Check it out.

A worthy experience, thanks in no small part to the sense of urgency that comes from the story being plucked straight from the world's headlines.

It's hard to deny that a coop beat-em-up with loads of visual flair and plenty of replayability (thanks to the various characters and even character builds you can try) represents damn good value for around $16 (it's 800 of Microsoft's mystical Points.) It's frustrating that you can't really find anyone to play with online, but friends / local coop cures that and, let's face it, this sort of game is more fun with friends than strangers anyway.

In the end it's a great PlayStation Vita game that is a bit too simple and a touch too cute to translate perfectly to the bigger Xbox 360 console. But terrorizing a planet has never been this friendly, this upbeat, or this much fun.

Visual novels rarely come as deep and thought provoking as this one.

A competent game, but more of an entertaining distraction than something you will invest much time into.

Valley’s answer to one of its main mysteries doesn’t quite satiate the curiosity it taunts, though it wisely leaves others unsolved.

I still find it refreshing that in a time where so many games assume the "more is more" addage, there are still a lot of thoughtful games out there that take their time to build atmosphere and story, and give players a bit of pondering time, rather than relying on reflexes (or frequent use of the autosave function). Gray Matter is definitely one of these games.

ocket Knight is one of the best downloadable games available and Climax, and Konami deserve all the acclaim they are bound to get from it.

This game pleasantly surprised me: simple in concept, but with an incredible amount of depth to it.

All up, while Tetris itself isn't new by any stretch of the imagination, there are enough other new gameplay variations, as well as multiplayer modes, to make this a solid addition to any gamer's collection – and a must-have for puzzle fans.